Regenerative in Nature - How Nature Helps Us Innovate with Eric Whitley Part 2 (of 2)
“When we talk about going out to nature, we have to understand what we’re experiencing. It’s all aspects of it. It’s the growth, it’s the beauty, it’s the magnificence of it, and to be alien from that is just not healthy”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM Eric Whitley
Eric Whitley brings 33 years of industry experience leading, facilitating, and supporting critical operations and technologies in nearly all aspects of grid operations. Over the years Eric has held leadership roles at Southern California Edison, California ISO, Midwest ISO, and WECC, serving in positions of Project and Technical Management, Plant Manager, EMS Manager, Manager of Reliability Applications, and Director of EMS/IT Services. These roles have focused on grid operations and technologies, IT leadership, project management, NERC compliance, and developing high performing teams in support of critical systems. GridSME is the culmination of Eric’s career in forming a consulting company that bring together Subject Matter Experts and clients who need assistance.
SIGNIFICANCE
“I think to realize where I'm at and to want to change and having really very little impediments to doing change, but also to want to. When Tony describes the six factors that humans focus on… certainty, uncertainty, significance, spirituality, growth, contribution. So when I look at significance, it's a tool to use. It's a need everybody has, but it's also a tool to use for motivation. So I love being significant. I like having instructive abilities. All these types of things are a good feedback loop for me. To be humble in that is to understand what you don't know, and just dive into something that you know nothing about, but you are intensely interested in ensuring that it has a positive benefit. So mine is climate, and the atmospheric ability to hold on to greenhouse gases, and how to draw that down. There's a huge wealth of purpose there. And again, it's that significance piece that I love. It is very uncertain. I could I could lose every dime I've been able to gain from the success of this company, but it is worthy of that kind of risk to me.”
the natural order
“I definitely go back to falconry here. You're taking a wild predator, and getting a partnership with it, so we can perform its natural role. And you're a participant in that. By doing that you experience all kinds of things. You experience how nature works, when it comes to natural selection. An animal living it's ripe old age out and dying of old age, that doesn't happen in nature. It becomes vulnerable, a predator or a pathogen or something moves in and takes it, there's no safety net. There's no guarantees in nature, you have the beautiful creation of predator prey, the balance of that.
In the spring, you have this huge massive offspring of all kinds of animals. And predators are right behind that with their offspring. So that young offspring learns how to survive. The prey gets smarter as it lives its life, on how to evade and all these types of things. And so it's a perfect system, and yet it has the beautiful parts to it and the most horrific parts of predation and the order of things. To me that's the fabric of how I understand things.
I can raise animals and have them slaughtered for the benefit of our health. I can do that. I feel that close to the predator side to it. But I love my animals. I love raising them. So I can see that sort of dichotomy of purpose there. You are part of nature. People that live in cities and concrete, they don't think they are but they are. Now, maybe that's what 2020 showed us. We found out that we are a species just like other ones. In fact, there's a terrible virus going through jackrabbits in the western US . It's a hemorrhaging disease, and it's wiping them out. You know, we'll have a big population die off of jackrabbits because they don't have vaccines. It's just going to go through that, that specific species, and they'll recover and they'll build back.
When we talk about going out to nature, we have to understand what we're experiencing. It's all aspects of it. It's the growth, it's the beauty, it's the magnificence of it. To be alien from that is just not healthy. It creates a bunch of people on their electronics. I think my my awareness of nature and everything is with me every day.”
quick tips
“Get outside. If you're spending eight hours a day in a cube, or in your home office, and you're focused on your work, just get outside. Even if you’re in the city, there's so much nature in city, because nature has the last word. It will show up. There's hawks, there's all kinds of birds and interesting flora. Be cognitive and aware of what you're looking at and get outside. I know, as a long distance runner, I could run forever on trails…put me on a road, like in a marathon or something like that. On a treadmill, I could last maybe two minutes. That was that. I tap into being outside, that's really cool.
And then go visit things like farms, go visit regenerative ranches, go visit organic farmers, and just sort of get in tune with what they are doing and how they're doing it. COVID showed in fact, there was a boon to Virginia ranching, and farming in during COVID. Because people were suddenly realizing that their health mattered and the protections they were doing. What does that mean about what you're eating? If you're eating something that is not healthy for you, this is the only body you're ever going to have. Right at 66 years old, let me tell you what abuse does to you. It makes you have to catch up quite a way. Look at farmers markets, things like that. But just basically think of yourself as needing outside environments. Holistically, you need it from your body, from your mind, through getting sunlight, all these things. It's just all about how you reconnect with how you got here. Now we evolved outside, we didn't evolve in a skyscraper or anything like that.”
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